Favorite Schools

Favorite Teams

Trenton Film Society celebrates Oscars and more with trio of festivals

Trenton film society.JPG

Nadine Patterson, curator for the Trenton Foreign Film Festival and Cynthia Vandenberg, Executive Director, Trenton Film Society & Trenton Film Festival, at Mill Hill Playhouse in Trenton in this 2010 file photo.
(Michael Mancuso/The Times of Trenton)

TRENTON — The Trenton Film Society kicks off its film festival season tomorrow night with its annual Oscar Shorts program at the Mill Hill Playhouse.

The International Film Festival in April and the Trenton Film Festival in June, which is back after a hiatus of several years, will follow soon after, offering movie lovers an opportunity to see films rarely seen elsewhere.

“All the things we ever developed that worked, we’re doing them all together in a tight run, so you really get to see the most independent films since there were movie theaters in the next four months,” said David Henderson, president of the society’s board of trustees. “It’s pretty exciting.”

This weekend features the Academy Award-nominated short films from the documentary, live-action and animation categories — 15 movies whose titles very few people are likely to have heard of before the Oscars on Sunday.

The documentary program, which will be screened tomorrow and Friday, at 6:30 and 7:30 p.m., respectively, includes “CaveDigger,” “Facing Fear,” “Karama Has No Walls,” “The Lady in Number 6: Music Saved My Life” and “Prison Terminal: The Last Days of Private Jack Hall.” The live-action program, which will be screened on Saturday at 12:30, 5 and 9:15 p.m., includes “That Wasn’t Me,” “Just Before Losing Everything,” “Helium,” “Do I Have to Take Care of Everything?” and “The Voorman Problem.” The animated program, which will be screened on Saturday at 3 and 7:30 p.m., includes “Feral,” “Get a Horse!” “Mr. Hublot,” “Possessions” and “Room on the Broom.”

Those who attend the 5 p.m. live-action showing also have the option of going to dinner at Settimo Cielo afterward.

“In addition to the presentation quality and availability, it’s the opportunity to connect with other film lovers and be part of the excitement of the Oscars,” Henderson said, adding that people cast their own ballots for the films they think will win.

Tickets are available in advance online, or at the door.

The International Film Festival, set for April 4 through 6, will present “brand new, cutting-edge” films curated by Jed Rapfogel, a film programmer for Anthology Film Archives in New York City.

It will be the first time many of the works have been seen outside of the film festivals at Cannes and Toronto, Henderson said.

“My goal was to put together a selection of contemporary foreign films that’s as wide-ranging stylistically and tonally as it is geographically,” Rapfogel said in a news release.

The subjects of the festival’s films range from a heavy metal band in war-torn Angola (“Death Metal Angola”) to a young novitiate nun in 1960s Poland (“Ida”).

“What’s lovely about this festival is the diversity of film, points of view, cultures, language and music,” Henderson said. “It’s a great cacophony of film that you wouldn’t normally have access to even if you lived in Manhattan.”

Rounding out the season is the return of the Trenton Film Festival, which will run from June 19 through 22.

“There’s quite a film community in this city and its surrounding towns,” Henderson said. “We wanted to reconnect with that and reconnect that community with itself, because the film festival really provided an avenue for that.”

The festival, he said, draws everyone from accomplished filmmakers to people who may never have screened their work in public before.

“For one weekend, this is the center of the independent film scene,” he said, adding that the filmmakers interact not only with each other, but also with the audience. “They get to connect with each other and learn from each other.”

The film society in the last several years explored other ideas, like the International and Not Quite Legal festivals, but for this year decided to put on all of its most successful festivals in close succession, Henderson said.